Talk:Champion of Storms, Thavas/@comment-8155837-20171106164307/@comment-11486763-20171106215218
Now I understand I have a tendency to be overly dramatic and perhaps a bit condescending(that means I talk down to peoplea joke) but there's a legitimate issue here and one that alot of people quick to sweep under the rug so I want to unpack this as carefuly as possible: First off there are a few basic elements that all games share, control exists in every competetive game and is a basic feature therein. Second While "rear guard reliant" is an important qualification within vanguard there's a larger consept above it on level with control. My personal theory is that in competetive games play breaks down into 3 styles that can further be sub-divided: control, aggro, tempo. Most decks cards and players tend to favour one of the elements but being able to function within multiple is obviously not unheard of. Backing up a second it is a generaly accepted principle of game design that counter-play opens options up and doesn't shut them down. Games are better when there's more interactivity. Now at this point a comon misconception is that "control limits options." This perspective is easy to understand but not accurate, for starts when considering this issue we are generaly talking about hard control: the actual removal of pieces, and the misconception comes from the idea that removing those pieces is an outright refusal of any of their functionality and therefore a limitation on what their owner can do in a game. The issue at this point is that, that is inaccurate. For starts hard control ads the aspect of timing into a game, the process of deciding when a piece can be most useful. Second it ads to the importance of rescource management, the definition of this is obvious. So the existence of hard control in a game changes the process of play from "get card, play card" to "get card, consider how card can be used most effectively, stratigize for ways to deploy cards that does not jeopordize position." It actualy ads interactivity back into the game. Now with all that said where does the anti control mindset come from? Simple Bushi doesn't know how tempo works. If we back up to my personal theory of game design the concepts inherrint to all games: control, aggro, tempo. Control refers to how one manipulates pieces in order to either gain advantage or disadvantage the opponent, Aggro refers to how a player/deck uses the basic elements of the game to actively persue a win con(usualy the inherrint wincon of the game.) Tempo refers to using pieces in the most effective way possible in order to gain an advantage. The interesting thing about these elements is that they balance eachother, tempo has a natural advantage over control as it involves using pieces effectively so even if they're removed or the opponent gets more they're not disadvantaged. Aggro beats tempo this is an issue of force overwhelming finesse, without tools to curb aggros advance tempo decks tend to get steam rolled. And importantly for this discussion control beats aggro, when aggro decks can't push past control advantage. These natural relationships are ofcourse altered by just how good a concept or archetype representing that concept are within games, or just the relative skill level and stratagies of players, it's an advantage but one that can be overcome. This is important because Bushi has been heavily favouring aggro designs for a while now. For sometime this was acceptable as vanguard as a game tends to favour advantage anyway, so alittle imbalance in favour of aggro was actualy an equalizing force. Things have changed, aggro is now better than every other archetype without question and the only way around it is to actively powercreep in control decks, which is fairly natural but the problem arises when dealing with those control decks because again: Bushi can't design tempo. At the start of the game the tempo clans would have been the retire clans(btw this is why I've always counted GB as a retire clan even if it's effects didn't lean on the concept as heavily as the others.) SP, GN, Tachi and GB. These clans were oriented around making best use of your pieces by litteraly asking when you were ok losing them and what you were willing to lose them for. The decline of 3 of these into aggro clans(granted Tachi always had a more aggresive spin to the concept) and SP into Luard who litteraly gets infinite free value superceding the concept of tempo shows just how incapable of designing for tempo Bushi is.(I should probably mention Tsukuyomi here, as her wincon involved getting to the stack so as to reliably hit triggers which put her somewhere between advantageI clasify as a self oriented control concept and tempo which is a mentality that was bolstered by having to play in a way that ensured reaching late game which gave it a tempo like playstyle. But yeah tskuyomi got eaten by Wakahirume like everything else OTT so....) The normal healthy way for a game to deal with control is to feed more tempo in, this stratagy does lead to power creep as slightly more powerful version keep getting introduced, but some amount of power creep is to be expected and really not as bad for games as people like to make it out to be. Bushi is really uncomfortable with people playing in ways they don't anticipate and I expect that's why they avoid tempo and why they favour aggro. So instead of introducing tempo or letting control players gain an advantage they design things like resist that outright deny your ability to play control, presumably attempting to keep the two concepts in balance without an effective paradigm to do so. The issue is that there's no way to play in consideration of things like resist, it's not ading complexity back into the game it just sits on cards removing an aspect of play. Rear-guards are in essence just deployed pieces so rear-guard relient decks are just a varient of aggro natural to this game. It's more important to establish larger paradigms that balance it with control and tempo based decks in order to keep the game diverse and healthy rather than ensure those specific decks are as playable as they want to be which does help some players but not the game as a whole.